“No, we’re not, ma’am. We’re from the Midwest—Wisconsin, me. We’re . . . explorers.”
Suddenly tears were running down her face. “Oh, it’s been so long!”
* * * *
“. . . came out here from Innsmouth three weeks after the Day,” said the woman who’d been Juanita Johnson once, and now thought of herself as Sun Hair. “The Emergency Committee had cut the ration to just one little bowl a day at the Distribution Center and there was fighting every day with the refugees. . . .”
The Day? She must mean the Change, Ingolf thought, nodding.
“My father and mother, my uncle John and aunt Sally and Mr. Granger and Lindy, the Smiths, and us kids . . . I was fifteen. Things were already very bad, and the rumors . . .”
She licked her lips again, then took Ingolf’s bowl and reached out to spoon more fish stew into it with a wooden ladle; the cauldron was made from the bottom half of an aluminum trash barrel. It was good stew, full of chunks of white cod meat and scallops and vegetables. The firelight shone on the faces—the warriors closest, and the two-score of women and children behind. He caught glimpses of a naked toddler huddled up against her mother, of another younger one at the breast. They murmured among themselves; mostly the odd-sounding language, but in it were English words he caught or half caught.
It was cooler now that the sun was down, not chilly but close enough to it that the fire’s warmth felt grateful on his skin. A couple of the older people had cloaks or blankets around their shoulders, made of glossy pelts.
“Later we realized they must be true. A few times in the years after that, boats came here . . . hunting . . . and we had to run or fight. Dad and Uncle John loaded ev erything we could find, the tools and seed and the three goats from Uncle John’s place we’d hidden from the Committee, and we headed out. I don’t know where Dad was really hoping for—he talked about going north to Maine. But there was a storm, and we were cast ashore here; we managed to get most of our stuff out but the boat was wrecked.”
She frowned. “I haven’t thought about it for a long time . . . I knew about Nantucket. I’d been there. This isn’t Nantucket. It looks a little like it, but the trees . . . and the people. They’re the . . . we’re the . . .”
Another word in that language; she smiled and thumped her forehead with the heel of her hand.
“The People. Or the Sea-Land People. They’re In dians, and they’d never heard of white men. Or metal, or growing corn, or . . . or anything. They said nobody had—they used to visit the mainland before the Day, only they say it was all forest too, and relatives of theirs lived there, not cities and things. Then there was a dome of fire, colored fire, and when it went away they were here. When my family got here they were sick; someone had already come here and left . . . I think it was chicken pox. Most of the People died of it. There’d been about a hundred, but only two dozen lived.”
All the watchers shuddered at the words chicken pox; some of them made signs that were probably for protection against evil magic.
“But they’re good people . . . and they had food; they knew how to fish and hunt. We stayed, and we helped with the sick, and learned to talk to them, and showed them things, and they showed us . . . My dad died six years later, drowned while he was out fishing. Mom got sick with some thing a year after that, I don’t know what, it was awful; she had this pain in her stomach. . . .Uncle John built boats for a hobby, so he knew how. . . .”
Ingolf finished the food and set the plastic bowl aside as Sun Hair rambled through her tale of years, of children born and folk dying, of learning and forgetting.
I don’t think she’s really wandered in her wits, he thought. Just a little strange, like a lot who had a hard time in those years. Hers wasn’t as hard as some. But Christ, this is weird!
He knew the history of America before the Change, at least in outline; he was a sheriff’s son, after all, an educated man who could both read and write fluently and cipher well. He’d read through an entire book on it, the Time-Life one, and another bound together from several carefully preserved National Geographics with wonderful pictures. This island was near where the first English had settled, four hundred years ago. And the Injuns they met had been farmers, albeit without iron or cattle or horses. How long since Nantucket had been covered in oak trees, peopled by folk who’d never seen corn?
His mind quailed at the gap of years. Of course, it must be possible. It’s here, isn’t it? And if God made the Change, why not this?
Kaur and Singh were looking bewildered. Kuttner looked like he was three sheets to the wind, and had been smoking something strong along with it. His eyes glittered, a look like lust. He leaned forward and cut in: “And Nantucket town? There?” he said, pointing east.
Sun Hair began to cry; her husband put an arm around her. “That’s where my boy Frank went!” she sobbed. “And he never came back! He never came back to me!”
* * * *
“I don’t like doing this to them,” Ingolf said, looking back at the Sea-Land People.
This was as close as they came to the great fishhook harbor where the maps said Nantucket town should stand. So far all they’d seen was forest and game trails, weaving to avoid patches of marsh and a few open old-field meadows. They were lamenting, weeping and throwing their hands rhythmically into the air at this act of suicide by their guests.
Morning sunlight speared through gaps in the forest canopy, thinner here right near the sea, and seemed to surround the locals with a nimbus of light as they wept and swayed.
Good people, he thought.
They’d had plentiful reason to fear and suspect out siders from the mainland, but they’d taken the travelers in without hesitation once they saw they weren’t wild men. One girl in particular had been very friendly later that night . . . though he suspected part of it was that they had a real limited selection of mates here if they wanted to avoid inbreeding. Singh was looking sort of sleek, too.
They moved forward; the trail was overgrown, and Singh and Kaur unlimbered their shetes and cut at ferns and blueberry bushes. Then they were in open country, on a neatly trimmed stretch of green, though that might be the angora goats the Sea Land People kept, descendants of the original nanny and her two kids.
Light flashed, through his eyes, through his upraised hands, through his mind as he shouted in protest. The moment of pain was endless, and over instantly. And—
* * * *
Sheriff Ingolf Vogeler sat in his chair of judgment, look ing down at the bound thief. It was a formal room, with a shelf of books, and black bordered pictures of his father and brother Edward on the wall behind. . . .
* * * *
“Christ!” he wheezed.
For an instant, two complete lives warred for posses sion of his mind, and he realized he didn’t even like the pompous self-righteous bastard he might have been.
* * * *
Troop-lieutenant Ingolf Vogeler looked down at the Sioux arrow that sprouted in his chest; he toppled slowly forward in the flame-shot night, dropping his shete as the choking salt invaded his lungs, dead on the day of his nineteenth birthday. . . .
* * * *
Ingolf Vogeler looked at the slowly rotating hologram model of the molecule and knew he wasn’t going to get the parasmallpox to do what he wanted....
“Save, store and restart from one-C,” he growled, reaching for the can of Mango cola.
* * * *
Somewhere his body took another step forward. Images of the land ahead of him strobed through his eyes—or perhaps not through his eyes. A quiet cobbled street lined with brick buildings. Ruins. The same cobbled street, with people in weird clothes or nothing, and vehicles that floated on turning silvery balls that seemed liquid somehow.
Planes of crystal light turning through spaces that hurt his mind like razors slicing at his flesh, too big, too big. Something stretched, gave way, like a guitar string stretched around the universe, shivering with a note that vibrated from fire to darknes
s and back to fire.
And Ingolf Vogeler was stumbling forward. He walked; there were stones beneath his feet, but someone else was walking just a second to the side of him, like standing between two mirrors and watching yourself recede into infinite distance. The building ahead of him was square, with five windows across the upper story, four and a door flanked by white pillars below, comely in an antique fashion like some of the older buildings back home, what an old man had told him once was called the Federal style. A flag hung from a pole over the white-painted door, the old US flag of Stars and Stripes.
The door opened. His hands and feet moved at nor mal speed, but somehow it took an endless effort of will to keep them in motion, a harder struggle than freeing a bogged horse once, when he stood in the muck and strained until the muscles of his stomach started to tear loose. Blurred afterimages floated behind every movement.
A hallway, with strange magnificent pictures—one of a blond woman in a skirt made of strings. And a voice, a voice that spoke within him, a roar of white noise that he struggled to understand. He felt like a tiny spout, with a torrent vaster than a waterfall trying to force its way through. He could not, and he must.
You are not the one. You must find him. Travel from sunrise to the sunset, and seek the Son of the Bear Who Rules. Tell the Sword of the Lady what awaits him.
A door swung open, slowly. The light behind it was terrible, and more than anything in all the world he wanted to turn away, turn aside, but he knew it would shine wherever he turned his head. Blood dribbled from his bitten lips, and the sting was sweetness.
The sword hung there. He craved it, and dropped to his knees, beating his fists on the floor, wailing the anguish of denial.
Chapter Six
Dun Juniper,
Willamette Valley, Oregon
December 17, CY22/2020 A.D.
“You poor man,” Juniper said, leaning forward and putting her hand on Ingolf’s.
The easterner looked wasted again as he stopped. Rudi frowned; he wanted to know about the sword.
First and foremost if it’s real, he thought. That was a wild tale!
A glance at his mother’s face brought him back to a host’s obligations. She frowned at Ingolf’s silence, then leaned forward and tapped him on either cheek.
“Uh!”
His eyes were wild and blank for a moment.Then he licked dry lips and took the cup of hot borage tea she pressed on him, drinking with a trembling hand and spilling a little.
“Sorry,” he said huskily. “Haven’t . . . I tried to keep from thinking about that.” He swallowed again. “So, I’m crazy, right?”
“This sword,” Juniper said. She met his eyes and held them with her own. “It was a longsword, double-edged, with a guard like a crescent moon, and a pommel of moon-opal held in antlers. Is that it?”
Rudi’s breath caught. She had shared that vision with him, but as far as he knew with no other. A great re laxation came to Ingolf’s face, as if some tension were unwound at last.
“Christ, I’m not crazy, then?”
“No, my poor Ingolf, you’re not. It’s far worse than that.”
Just then Aunt Judy walked into the hall. She gave an angry hiss as she saw Ingolf’s face, came up and took his pulse. Then she examined his eyes; he moved his face obediently to her prodding, passive as a child.
“Juney, are you trying to kill my patient? I said he could talk, not be wrung out like a dishrag!”
“I’m sorry, Judy,” Juniper said meekly. “We can stop now.”
“We certainly can! I want this man in bed, now. I’ll get some green oat milk in wine to calm him.”
“I want—” Ingolf began.
“You want a good night’s sleep, so you can tell us the rest tomorrow,” Juniper said. “We’ve a guest room ready for you here in the hall. And Judy’s word is final on matters of health!”
Unprompted, Rudi came forward and helped the other man rise, then took an arm around his shoul der. When they’d put Ingolf to bed he stopped in the corridor outside the guest room and looked at his mother.
“Who’s the sword for?” he asked bluntly.
Juniper looked at him, and he was shocked to see that the leaf-green eyes were full of tears.
“Oh, my son,” she whispered. “You know as well as I. What did they call Mike, your blood father?”
The Bear Lord.
“And what did the Powers speak through me, when I held you over the altar in the nemed?”
He didn’t need to speak that, either. That was when she’d named him Artos, in the Craft. And . . . to himself, he whispered what she’d said:
Sad winter’s child, in this leafless shaw—
Yet be Son, and Lover, and Hornèd Lord!
Guardian of my sacred Wood, and Law—
His people’s strength—and the Lady’s Sword!
“I don’t want to go,” he said softly. “I thought . . . not yet.” His eyes went out past the walls of his home. “I’m not a boy anymore, Mother.”
They both knew what he meant; that he was old enough to know how easily and quickly a man could die. Ingolf’s tale had rammed that home anew. He went on: “And I don’t want to leave you and Father and Maude and Fior bhinn,” he said. “Or the Clan, and home. Someday, yes, but . . . not yet.”
Love and sorrow warred in Juniper’s eyes. “I don’t want you to go either, my darling. I just don’t think you’ve much choice.”
Rudi’s temper flared for a moment: “I thought we were the Lord and Lady’s children, not their slaves!”
Her palm reached up to cup his cheek. She was a full nine inches shorter than he, but he felt like a child again at the gesture. Then she tweaked his ear sharply and he jumped.
“Yes, we are Their children,” she said. “So are cock roaches . . . and crocodiles . . . and crocuses. We are not the sum whole of the scheme of things! So don’t be thinking that They’ll necessarily favor you, any more than I’d put you before your sisters.”
“Sorry, Mom,” he said after a moment. A grin. “I’ve been hanging around with Christians too much, sure and I have. Nice people, a lot of them, but they’ve got a strange way of looking at things.”
“Oh, my dearest one,” she said.
Her voice choked a little. Suddenly he noticed how many gray threads there were in the mane that had always been so fiery fox-red.
When did that happen? he asked himself, and put an arm around her shoulders. She turned into it and rested her forehead on his chest.
Her quiet voice went slowly on: “And They can be as harsh as sleet and iron, as the wolf in winter and Death itself. They have given you so many of Their gifts for a reason. And a man who refuses a duty They lay on him is . . .not punished . . . but . . .forsaken. And he will never know love or honor or happiness again.”
He shivered at the look in those infinitely familiar green eyes; they were looking beyond.
Then they squeezed shut, and tears leaked out, sparkling in the lamplight; she grabbed him by the plaid.
“But how I wish you didn’t have to go to that dread ful place! I am so frightened for you, and it will only get worse!”
“There, and I was just grousing,” he said, holding her close and remembering her rocking his troubles away. “I’ll come back with a shining sword and fine tale, since the Powers would have it so. It’s just that I would have them be a bit more open about the reasons for it all!”
* * * *
Rudi Mackenzie dreamed. The air was sweet and mildly warm, smelling of earth and growing things; some crop that grew in leafy blue-green clumps stretched to the edge of sight in neat rows separated by dark, damp turned earth. A well-made road ran through it, neatly cambered with crushed rock, and a milepost stood nearby. It was granite, hard and smooth, and the rayed sun on it was cut deeply, but time had still worn it down until the shape was visible only because of the slanting rays of the real sun setting in the west.
A crack and a wretched gobbling sound came from behind him.
He turned, or at least his disembodied view point did. A score of . . . creatures . . . were working their way down the rows of the crop.
They look like men, he thought absently.
A little; they stood on two legs, and their hands held tools, digging sticks of polished wood set with blades of smooth stone. But their legs were too short and the arms that hung from their broad flat shoulders too long, and the heads sloped backward above their eyes. Those eyes were big and round, on either side of a blob of nose and set above big chinless thin-lipped mouths; it made them look like children, somehow, and the more horrible for that. The naked bodies were brown, sparsely covered in hair.
A nondescript-looking man with a loose headcloth covering half his face rode a horse behind them, a long coiled whip in his hand. He swung it again, seemingly to relieve his boredom; the creatures were working steadily and well, jabbing the sticks downward in unison every time they took a step forward. Another worker jerked and moaned as the lash laid a line across his shoulders, then turned his too big eyes down and drove the stone-headed tool into the earth again.
No. They’re not men, but their ancestors were, Rudi’s bodiless presence thought.
Then he woke. Shudders ran through him, and he could feel sweat running off him to soak the coarse brown linen of the sheets. That turned chilly quickly in the damp cold air of winter. The girl who was sharing his bed had awoken too; she snapped a lighter on the bedside table and touched it to the candle in its holder.
“What a dream.” He gasped, clutching at the blanket as if it would help him keep the shattered, fragmented images clear. “My oath, what a dream!”
“It must have been, Rudi!” Niamh said.
Her blue eyes were wide as she tossed back tousled straw-blond hair. Like half the people in Dun Juniper she was an apprentice from somewhere else, in her case studying under Judy Barstow. They’d been friends and not-very serious occasional lovers for years; she didn’t want anyone long term here, since she planned to go back home to Dun Laurel when she was consecrated as a healer.
“You clouted me a bit, thrashing around the now, and I couldn’t wake you.”